The AAAS 2007 annual meeting theme was "Science and Technology for Sustainable Well Being;" IEEE hosted a conference on sustainable energy technology; there are literally dozens of sustainable business conferences each year. The fact that these diverse disciplines have each staked a claim on sustainability begs a question: What is sustainability science and can it make us sustainable?

If sustainability science requires interdisciplinarity, how do these diverse disciplines integrate the insights that each brings? How do we reconcile differing basic assumptions to solve an urgent and global problem? How do we ensure that research outputs of ecology and other disciplines lead toward sustainability?

A panel of Osvaldo Sala (Brown University), a member of ESA’s sustainability science initiative steering committee; Genevieve Maricle and Nat Logar (Arizona State University), leading the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes project to identify the most promising and plausible approaches to improving the societal value of sustainability-related research; and Bryan Norton (Georgia Tech), the author of Searching for Sustainability, will provide perspectives on sustainability science and whether it can make us sustainable. These brief presentations will be followed by a moderated audience discussion to explore options for integrating different types of research outputs needed to create a sustainable society.